Big Content takes out big lawsuits down under

Big Content is having a go at exporting its P2P extortion racket to Australia.

After suing over 3.6 million people in Germany, and 200,000 in the United States it seems that Big Content’s copyright trolls have their eyes set on Australia.

According to a report from one of the country’s leading ISPs, thousands of Australians will soon be accused of a crime by the Hollywood studios and told to pay up cash or go to court.

The model is similar to what has been seen in other parts of the world. A law firm partners up with a film, music or game studio which does not care what people think of it.

Using a dubious bit of IP address harvesting software, the studio obtains what it claims are the real identities from ISPs. Then it is just a matter of threatening to sue for an outrageous amount of money but offer to settle for less.

Torrentfreak spoke to John Linton, chief of ISP Exetel who said his outfit had been approached by US film distributor Lightning Entertainment. It had a list of 150 IP addresses from where their movie “Kill The Irishman” is said to have been shared. The same outfit is targeting 9,000 Australian-based infringements.

Lightning is using a front company to extort cash from alleged infringers called ‘Movie Rights Group’.

The Movie Rights Group’s people are not talking about who they are and their domain name is anonymised, but its vice president of sales and marketing is a man called Gordon Walker. He said the internet is the ultimate unkillable beast. But the Movie Rights Group is “a commercial solution” to what had previously been seen as a legislative problem,

He used the idea that you need cops on the information superhighway and since the government wouldn’t do it, it was up to Big Content.

Of course, if you are pulled over by a traffic cop you sort of expect that he has evidence that you have been speeding and not just pulling over the people that are moving slow enough to catch.